The number of sexual offences reported on Britainís railways has more than doubled over the past five years, according to police. Across Britainís railways, including the tube, there were 2,382 offences in 2017, compared with 1,049 reported in 2013, British Transport Police (BTP) figures show.

Overall, crime has generally fallen on public transport over the last decade, and police said the number of sexual offences reflected campaigns to encourage the reporting of these crimes. However, police believe that most such incidents remain unreported.

Will come back and add link - clicked on the wrong button and lost the original page!

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Coffee Shop Admin, Member of Melksham Rail User Group, on the board of TravelWatch SouthWest and some more things besides

Simply because BTP majored on getting sexual 'touching' reported by text to 61016. Unfortunately, never tested the date by investigation/prosecution so difficult to say how many off these were simply down to crush-loadings on tube journeys for example. Who's to say any text report is *actually* a crime? Don't believe everything you read.

The article says "The number of sexual offences reported" and not "The number of sexual offences". And I believe it when I read that the number of sexual offences reported has more than doubled.

These offences / what happens are not new. I have (over my many years) been so close / trusted by three ladies that I have been in their confidence about such things, and two of the three have told me of things that have happened to them while travelling - and that's back in the last century. But ... in neither case were these happenings reported. My sample size isn't large enough to have any statistical significance (and isn't likely to grow at all) but would suggest that it's the reporting (as read) and not the actual instance count that has grown.

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Coffee Shop Admin, Member of Melksham Rail User Group, on the board of TravelWatch SouthWest and some more things besides

It was the "offences reported" that I was referring to. It's only an 'offence' once determined as such by the police having collected *all* the evidence. And that doesn't happen.

Something can be reported as being an offence without it actually being one ... and it's the number of reports that the article is about. I suppose "alleged offences reported" would have been pedantically correct in the original article.

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Coffee Shop Admin, Member of Melksham Rail User Group, on the board of TravelWatch SouthWest and some more things besides

Those figures already being used by some as fact that sexual offence crime has doubled! Absolutely no proof of that in these statistics. I agree it is likely to have risen quite possibly....but anywhere near doubled is not proven

Whilst I agree that it's misleading saying the number of offences have doubled I do think it's a good thing there is an easier way of reporting these things these days..

I, like the ladies that Graham mentioned, experienced this more than once quite a few years ago and once within the last ten years and it's no less of an offence just because I didn't report it at the time.

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